Olympics need to be leaner, smarter to score a host

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh says the city won’t host the Olympics after being chosen by the USOC.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh says the city won’t host the Olympics...

You’re probably familiar with the scene when a city wins the right to host the Olympic Games. There’s a global TV hookup and official at a podium who says something like: “The Games of the (fill in year) Olympiad have been awarded to ...”

And then there’s pandemonium in the winning city. Someone cues the confetti cannons, the camera cuts to cheering residents and city officials begin to pontificate about lofty Olympic goals.

They did it a little differently in Boston on Monday. In a hastily called press conference, Mayor Martin Walsh had a two-word message for the United States Olympic Committee: no thanks.

Boston — selected by the USOC over San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to be the American bid city — is out. Which would be mildly interesting if it weren’t for an alarming trend for the International Olympic Committee.

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Finding a host for the 2022 Winter Olympics went from a formal coronation to speed dating. Stockholm; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine, all pulled out. They follow St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Munich, who also dropped their bids.

But the real harbinger of bad news came in October when Oslo withdrew its bid. Norway doesn’t want to host the Winter Olympics? Norwegians live the Winter Olympics. If you can’t convince Norway, there’s something seriously wrong. Apparently, Beijing, which has already hosted the Summer Games, was still eager and will get the Games.

All of which brings us to San Francisco. As The Chronicle reported, there is talk of Los Angeles and San Francisco joining forces to host a combined Summer Games in 2024.

Frankly, that’s a long shot. If the IOC complaint about the original San Francisco bid was that the events were too spread out, how about two cities 400 miles apart? And Paris and Hamburg are both still in the running and would fit the IOC template — cosmopolitan cities. So good luck with that.

But in the time San Francisco was in the running, it was looking at a streamlined event, using many existing facilities and pop-up venues. So was Los Angeles, which is saying it could host the Games with almost no preparation, using stadiums and college dorms already in place.

Cheap, small, better

Sooner or later, that’s going to be the new model for hosting the Games. Instead of “higher, stronger, faster,” the Olympic motto will be “cheaper, smaller, better.”

You won’t be surprised to hear that the reason Boston withdrew was money. When the USOC said it wanted the city to pay any cost overruns, polls show the tide of public approval — as high as 55 percent in January — plunged below 40 percent.

Of course, supporters said, nobody says the Olympics are going to run a deficit every time. Unfortunately, somebody did. In 2012, the University of Oxford did a financial study of the Olympic Games from 1960 to 2012.

“The Games,” the study concluded, “overrun with 100 percent consistency. The data thus show that for a city and nation to decide to host the Olympic Games is to take on one of the most financially risky type of mega-project that exists, something that many cities and nations have learned to their peril.”

The deficits are not minor, either. The Oxford study said the average cost overrun is 179 percent. San Francisco had a reasonable $5 billion budget to host the Games. Unfortunately, in the current configuration, that wouldn’t fund a long jump pit. The 2012 Games in London came in at $14.8 billion, $4 billion over what was budgeted.

Boston gave the sensible Olympics a try. Chris Dempsey, one of the founders of “No Boston Olympics,” says it all seemed so logical.

“We were going to have the Opening Ceremony at Fenway Park,” he said. “And the athletes would stay in existing college dorms.”

But once the bid was in play, “all those myths were debunked,” Dempsey says.

“Now we needed a (new) Olympic Stadium, an aquatic center and a velodrome,” he said. “And the athletes need a (new) Olympics village.”

Until now, that’s how this has worked. Cities fell all over themselves to try to get the bid, escalating their offers to compete with competitors. Andrew Zimbalist, who wrote “Circus Maximus,” about the finances of the Olympics and World Cup, says the Olympic Committee had a pretty sweet deal until recently.

Trouble finding hosts

“Basically, they just snapped their fingers and said, ‘OK, the race has begun,’” Zimbalist said. “Now I think they have a crisis.”

Zimbalist says IOC president Thomas Bach, elected in 2013, is reacting with a personal world tour to woo potential hosts.

“They have to talk people into it,” Zimbalist says. “Bach stops by and says, “The IOC would love to have the Olympics in your city. You guys need to bid.”

Unfortunately, the numbers still don’t add up. As long as the IOC still thinks it is putting on an international extravaganza instead of a major sports event, the only sites that will bid will be cities that want to promote themselves on the world stage, regardless of the cost.

That can’t last. A leaner, smarter Olympics Games is coming. It just makes sense.

And when it does, San Francisco — innovative, beautiful and sensible — is ready to explore options. Until then, good luck with extravaganza. We will be waiting.